Friday night

It's a Friday night and I'm sat in my tiny flat by myself, having just eaten a microwave cheeseburger and enjoying a can of Carling. Is this how my life is heading? Hope not/don't think so - I could have spent a romantic evening at my girlfriend's flat but I had to come home to print off the scripts for tomorrow's 'new material' day, which I am more than a little anxious about. I'm anxious because I'm not too confident about the material I've churned out this year to be honest, 'Cat Food' has potential to be a real winner and I feel like I've hit top form with that, whilst 'Jason's Last Night In Town' also has great potential. But will anybody really like 'Honey I've Been Really Struggling' - only if they get the Camera Obscura and Ed Harcourt references perhaps, and on reading back 'Reviewing Jonathan', one of my other short plays, even I think I'm weird. We'll see though, we've got some of my trusty regular actors - Colin, Vaughan, Heather, Juliette there to tomorrow, as well as 2 excellent newcomers - Emma Spearing and Cara McLean, both of whom I respect greatly, so it should be either a) interesting or b) embarrassing - depending on how my latest ideas are recieved. And as always there's a real shortage of male actors, a problem that would be solved if Kevin learnt how to answer his mobile.

It's been a good, if exhausting week. After the fun of the Haiti gig on Sunday evening, I spent Monday night back at one of my regular recording haunts; Half Ton Studios in Milton, with the ever excellent Rob Toulson behind the desk. I was recording with Alighting, all felt a bit nostalgic but I came away feeling I did a really good job for them - the whole splashy ride and hot-rod trick seemed to suit their Cambridge Folk Festival-tailored sound a treat, and we discovered this fairly early in the session which was a bonus. Tuesday was supposed to be my quiet night in/catch up on cleaning evening, but Jess and Alister from Under The Streetlamp came around and we got really drunk instead, how childish, but much fun was had. Wednesday I enjoyed the rare pleasure of actually catching a Spurs game on TV and an even rarer pleasure of watching us win convincingly, and last night I went to the launch of 'Lol-a-thon', which is a new comedy night for Cambridge that my good friend Andy Higson has organised. 10 comedians on the bill so obviously a little hit and miss, but headliner David Trent (whom I had the pleasure of randomly booking for a Jiggery Pokery Cabaret show last year) was immense and worth the cheap entry fee alone. So, here I am - creatively more inspired than ever, with more ideas than ever, but also having more fun than ever - which takes up so much time.

Much to do, urgent priorities need to be booking up the Brighton Fringe shows (depending on how tomorrow goes we'll know how many of them) - we have the venue waiting for us which is lovely of them, and I also need to sort out the Under The Streetlamp album recording before Alister buggers of to Mexico. I'm still not sure if I'm going to do the Edinburgh Fringe this year - and I never thought I'd say that. I have one or two doubts at the moment - like would my life be enhanced by a fifth fringe show? Would this script I'm working on for it be actually better than the last 4? I need to develop, I need to move on, and sometimes self-producing doesn't help that. It also takes a long chunk of my year up, and I can't help but feel I could be spending the time trying to write 'the' radio sitcom that I always knew I could - that really would be progression. But then again August without the Edinburgh Fringe is like December without Christmas. True, I could just go there as a spectator - but being at the Edinburgh Fringe without a show of my own would be like Christmas without presents, which, as we all know, would be rubbish.